The digital transformation is one of the key challenges in many industries and fields of business when it comes to rationalizing and automating internal processes. Customer-individual mass production, for example, requires a high degree of autonomy from production systems in order to meet the increasing complexity of cyberphysical systems and the growing efficiency pressures in a cost-effective way. With this in mind, the new field of competence Knowledge-based Systems Engineering (KBSE) is conducting research into a knowledge-based engineering concept that provides solutions for these requirements.
Knowledge-based engineering concept
The new fortiss field of competence Knowledge-based Systems Engineering (KBSE) conducts applied research into formal knowledge representation and interpretation for cyberphysical systems (CPS). The scientists’ knowledge-based engineering concept contains the semantic description and integration of relevant data and the knowledge about a product or service, the associated creation process and the hardware or software resources being used. The growing complexity of the requirements, as well as the growing demand for digital connectivity between different sources and types of data shows the growing significance of this new area of research. The team led by Alexander Perzylo develops strategies for the semantic modeling and interpretation of relevant knowledge that serves as the foundation for autonomous decisions in terms of the design, configuration and operation of CPS.
Automated engineering tasks
Digitalization approaches used to date, such as scanning text documents into image or PDF files, or linking data from various sources via spreadsheet calculations, are vastly insufficient. Although digital representations of data, they offer no access to the meaning coded in the data – the semantic – and their dependencies. To find the results, the KBSE field of competence relies on ontology-based semantic description languages to identify and combine specific areas, as well as general and other knowledge about the application domains, so that a deeper understanding of their relationships is ultimately gained. Using this rich semantic context information, a wide range of engineering tasks along the value chain can be automated. The KBSE field of competence supports numerous national and international research projects from areas such as industrial automation, robotics and agriculture. The goal is to employ these approaches in other application domains in the future as well.
